Tropical Software Observations

After a few days of trying out Polymer, here are some of my first impressions.

What is Polymer?

According to its official website, Polymer is a new type of library for the web, built on top of Web Components, and designed to leverage the evolving web platform.

Solving the new <table /> issue

Although we have come a long way from <table /> layouts to the Semantic Web, it's still obvious that we are merely using <div /> or other elements to replace tables. With Polymer, which utilizes Web Components, we can finally realise the real Semantic Web to encapsulate structural details of components in separate files so that our documents are more readable.

You can see in the example above that there isn't much difference between the data binding strategies of AngularJS and Polymer.

Conclusion and first impressions

At the moment Polymer is still quite new for me and I'm still trying to grasp how it works. If fact, the examples I used above might not even be how the Google Developers Group intended it to be used, but I am sure it lays a good foundation for other upcoming web frameworks.